Historical Revisionism and 'Relativising the Holocaust'

Whether the received wisdom on an historical event can be subjected to scholarly scrutiny depends upon the method by which the subject is utilized by entrenched interests. Hence, let the scholar or student who embarks on the questioning of certain sacred cows beware lest he be damned for heresy. This essay examines a polemical technique branded ‘relativising the Holocaust’, toward the end of extending the limits of scholarly enquiry. The essay examines several examples of acceptable and unacceptable forms of revisionism from the relativist perspective.

Winston Churchill & Gassing Primitives

The Churchill Centre was formed in 1994, emerging from the International Churchill Society of the United States.[1] The Centre is dedicated to promoting the memory of Winston S. Churchill. This includes debunking allegations against Churchill that put the democratic idol in less than a Godlike light. Much of its work is, then, like that of the Institute for Historical Review, Inconvenient History, or David Irving’s Real History, revisionist. However, unlike these three mavericks, The Churchill Centre’s revisionism is not only of an acceptable nature, but is regarded as laudable, and attracts notable patronage.[2]

An entire section of the centre website is devoted to Churchillian historical revision, under the title ‘Leading Churchill Myths’.[3] One item that might be of particular interest to revisionists is the repudiating of the allegation that Churchill ordered the gassing of Iraqi rebels during the 1920s. This is of particular interest because it is, on several significant points, analogous to the ‘historical revisionist’ contentions in regard to the gassing of Jews by the Hitler regime during World War II. My comparison, as will be shown below, is a form of ‘relativism’. The Churchill Centre, in recognising that the gassing of Iraqis is a matter that is generally accepted by historians, quotes from Science Daily,[4] that:

It has passed as fact among historians, journalists and politicians, and has been recounted everywhere from tourist guidebooks to the floor of the U.S. Congress: British forces used chemical weapons on Iraqis just after World War I.[5]

The Science Daily article reproduced by The Churchill Centre goes on to state that R M Douglas, Associate Professor of History at Colgate University, has repudiated the allegation. The article continues:

Allegations of chemical bombings by the British erupted into the public sphere during the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq’s history of chemical weapons did not start with Saddam Hussein’s gas attack on the Kurds, scholars and critics asserted. It was Great Britain when it controlled the region under League of Nations mandate in the 1920s that first used chemical weapons in the region to quell Arab uprisings. Many scholars went so far as to root Arab distrust of the West in Britain’s brutal chemical attacks.[6]

Douglas, however, finds that these claims - oft repeated in books, newspapers and political speeches - rest on very shaky foundations. The first blunt assertion of British chemical weapons use in Iraq comes from a 1986 essay by historian Charles Townshend.[7]

According to Douglas, the allegation of gassing derives from a letter written in 1921 by J A Webster, an official at the British Air Ministry. Townshend cited the Webster letter to the British Colonial Office that tear gas shells had been used against Arab rebels with ‘excellent moral effect’. According to Douglas however, Townshend had been wrong: The Army had asked permission to use the shells and the Webster comment on the ‘excellent moral effect’ was only an estimation of what might occur. Shortly after the Webster letter the British Colonial Office had sought clarification from Army General Headquarters in Baghdad and was informed that gas shells had not been used in any manner. From this letter, however, the allegation took on a life of its own, with varying accounts blaming either aerial bombardment or artillery shelling. ‘Though the specifics differed, each allegation treated the incident as a matter of unassailable fact. Douglas’s research suggests it is anything but’.[8 ]

Winston Churchill voiced support of the use of poison gas against Arabs, "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden (1854-1937) is shown with Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty) in 1912.
By Agence photographique Rol (Bibliothèque nationale de France) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The article relates that giving credence to the story was the desire by British Ministers of the Crown to use gas shells or bombs against the Iraqi rebels, ‘But wanting to use them does not mean they did’. Douglas states that during 1920-21 there had been two instances where British policy had been to use gas against insurgents but, ‘In both cases practical difficulties rather than moral qualms ...prevented their use’. Indeed, it remains undisputed even apparently by The Churchill Centre that, to quote from the report, when in 1920 an Arab rebellion occurred, Churchill as Secretary of War, was ‘a vocal advocate of nonlethal gas use’ and gave field officers permission to use existing stocks of tear gas shells. However, the nearest stock was in Egypt and by the time the shells arrived, the rebellion was over. Anticipating renewed hostilities, in 1922 a Royal Air Force Commander sought permission to convert the shells into aerial bombs, and Churchill signed off on the request, which was rescinded two days later only because the Washington Disarmament Conference passed a resolution banning the use of tear gas. The article states:

There is little doubt had the timing of these events been slightly different - had the 1920 rebellion lasted longer or if there had been time to convert the shells to aerial bombs - that British forces would have used their chemical ordnance. And that, says Douglas, may have vastly changed the course of history. Churchill had given authorization to use chemical agents without consulting his colleagues in the Cabinet, most of whom would have vigorously objected.[9]

Douglas opines that had such weapons been used, an outcry, with memories of the use of mustard gas during World War I, might have resulted in ‘an abrupt end’ to Churchill’s career’.

Despite ‘faulty evidence’, appeals to this alleged use of gas against Iraqis in the 1920s resurfaced in regard to allegations of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks against Kurds during their 1988 rebellion.

The symmetrical appeal of history faithfully repeating itself no doubt accounts for much of the public and scholarly credence accorded to claims that the British used chemical weapons in Mandatory Iraq, their inconsistency and implausibility notwithstanding, Douglas writes.[10 ]

Gassing – Hitler & Churchill

While one might think that the new (2009) revelations as to Churchill’s ‘innocence’ in regard to gassing Iraqis does not do much to enhance his moral character, my primary interest is not the veracity of the allegations against Churchill. Rather, it is the analogous character of the allegations against Churchill and those against Hitler, in regard to claims of gassing Arabs and Jews respectively, and how re-examinations of these allegations are treated differently. Here are some parallels between the two:

Both allegations involve ethnic groups: Arabs and Jews, and both involve attitudes towards those ethnic groups based on race theories. Winston Churchill stated of the issue: ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’.[11]

Both allegations involve the use of gas: (a) tear gas on Arabs, (b) Cyanide gas on Jews.

Both rely on documents the implications of which are open to interpretation.

Both have become oft-repeated allegations, the repetitions of which have been sufficient of themselves to sustain the allegations. The gassing of Iraqis and the gassing of Jews have therefore both taken on the characters of myth and legend. This is what Douglas calls, in regard to a Churchill order for Iraqi rebels, ‘The symmetrical appeal of history faithfully repeating itself [accounting] for much of the public and scholarly credence accorded to claims… their inconsistency and implausibility notwithstanding’.

Because an alleged event ‘has passed as fact among historians, journalists and politicians’ should not render it an ‘unassailable fact’.

Wanting to do something or discussing the option does not make it an accomplished fact. Hence, in regard to the support by Churchill and other Government Ministers, ‘wanting to use [tear gas shells] does not mean they did’, any more than discussions on the possibility of exterminating Jews at some levels of the Third Reich administration does not prove that any such policy was put into effect.

It is not my purpose here to argue the merits or otherwise of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’ as some call it, or the (much) less-than-scholarly ‘Holocaust Denial’ as it is called by others, but rather to question what has been termed ‘relativism’ which Lipstadt et al apply to aspects of historical revisionism not to their liking, while applying ‘relativism’ as a technique of their own.

The primary questions raised by Prof. Douglas in repudiating the widely accepted belief that the British military used gas against Arab rebels in the 1920s, have also been raised in regard to the widely held view that 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated – mainly by gassing - by the Hitlerite regime as part of an official policy. Suffice it to mention, when this allegation was subjected to rare challenges in Canadian courts in 1985 and 1988 in the prosecution of Ernst Zündel, many of the primary elements of the ‘Holocaust’, regarded as a matter of unassailable fact by academia, took a hammering under the cross-examination of Zündel’s defence lawyer, Douglas Christie. Dr Robert Faurisson, in summarising the cross-examination of the Prosecution’s expert witness, Raul Hilberg, who declined to return to Toronto for the 1988 trial, stated that Hilberg was ‘forced to admit that for what he called the policy of extermination of the Jews there was neither a plan, nor a central organisation, nor a budget, nor supervision’. The Allies had never carried out a forensic examination of the primary ‘weapons’, the gas chambers, nor had there ever been an autopsy of a corpse that had allegedly been gassed with Zyklon B. No written orders from Hitler or Himmler for the extermination of Jews had ever been found.[12]

The case for the British gassing of Iraqis in the 1920s seems neither more nor less convincing than the case for the Germans having gassed Jews during the 1940s. Whether one, neither, or both events actually took place is not the concern here. The question is: why are those who raise the same questions in regard to the ‘Holocaust’ as those raised by Prof. Douglas and promoted by the prestigious Churchill Centre, published by Science Daily, and as a scholarly paper in The Journal of Modern History,[13] not accorded the same hearing as those involved with any other form of historical revisionism? Why has ‘holocaust revisionism’ been excluded, on pain of banishment, imprisonment, pillorying, and even death[14], as just another aspect of historical revisionism? The questions raised by the so-called ‘Holocaust deniers’ are in substance no different from those raised in regard to numerous applications of revisionism, such as those of Prof. Douglas.

Dr Robert Faurisson, whose scholarly qualifications and record have been impressive by any criteria, was recognised as an ‘expert witness’ in both the 1985 and 1988 trials of Ernst Zündel in Toronto. He was a tenured professor at the University of Lyon where he taught Modern Literature and Text and Document Criticism. He applied his scholarly discipline to an examination of the documents at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the National Archives of the USA, the State Museum at Auschwitz, and the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, West Germany. He also conducted on-site examinations of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.[15] Dr Faurisson has posed the same types of questions in regard to the gassing of Jews as those posed by Prof. Douglas in regard to the gassing of Iraqis. Among those questions are the different interpretations that can be applied to key texts in regard to the ‘Holocaust’, in a manner that seems analogous to Prof. Douglas’s contention that statements of opinion do not necessarily prove the realisation of those opinions as policy; in this instance, Churchill’s opinion of ‘primitives’ is analogous to the anti-Semitic opinions of some National Socialist leaders, which are marshalled to ‘prove’ that these opinions were translated into a policy of genocide.

When Dr Faurisson published his first major article on the ‘Holocaust’ in Le Monde in 1978 he was teaching at the University of Lyon. As a result he was subjected to many demonstrations and ‘punched many times’. He had ‘many, many lawsuits’ against him, and ‘many trials’.[16] His teaching career was ‘permanently ended’ in 1979.[17] It would be superfluous to further relate Dr Faurisson’s predicament since applying his expertise to the subject of the Holocaust. The record is easy enough to find.

My interest in this regard is not the veracity of Dr Faurisson’s contentions. They might be totally erroneous. I frankly do not know, as the ‘Holocaust’ has only ever been of marginal interest to me. My concern is that such questions are as legitimate as any other form of historical revisionism, and that Dr Faurisson and countless other scholars, should no more be subjected to outright persecution for their research than Prof. Douglas or any other researcher pursuing a revisionist study on any subject.

What is of particular relevance in regard to the question of ‘relativism’ in scholarship is that Prof. Douglas is pursuing an important aspect of World War II revisionism. His latest book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War,[18] is intended to show that the mass expulsions of ethnic German populations from central and southern Europe after World War II was anything but ‘orderly and humane’. This historical revisionism, so far from being suppressed or driven to the fringes of underground publishing, is being published by Yale University Press. The advertising blurb from Yale University Press states of the book:

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced relocation of German speakers from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable—between 12,000,000 and 14,000,000 civilians, most of them women and children—and the losses horrifying—at least 500,000 people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, while locked in trains en route, or after arriving in Germany exhausted, malnourished, and homeless. This book is the first in any language to tell the full story of this immense man-made catastrophe.

Based mainly on archival records of the countries that carried out the forced migrations and of the international humanitarian organizations that tried but failed to prevent the disastrous results, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War is an authoritative and objective account. It examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the expulsions were conceived, planned, and executed and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The book is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and it may also be the most significant untold story of the Second World War.[19]

Douglas’s book Orderly and Humane is not due for release until May 2012, and it is therefore too early to see what type of reception it will receive. What stands out from the Yale University Press blurb for the book is that Douglas appears to be undertaking one of the cardinal sins of ‘Holocaust revisions’ and their fellow-travellers: ‘relativising the Holocaust’. The question might be one of Douglas being too secure in his position for the Holocaust lobbyists and professional Jewish organizations to wish to confront. While Douglas does not seem to be Jewish, certainly being Jewish has not saved others from opprobrium when dealing with subjects that are regarded as related to ‘Holocaust revisionism’, namely John Sack for An Eye for an Eye, dealing with Jewish-run concentration camps in Poland after World War II and the treatment there of German prisoners by Jewish personnel; and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, by Prof. Norman Finkelstein.[20]

Will Douglas escape condemnation, when even Jewish Leftists such as Sack and Finkelstein have not, for his having, no doubt inadvertently, ‘relativised the Holocaust’?[21] Orderly and Humane is unlikely to directly challenge Zionism and Israel, unlike the late (d. 2004) Sack’s An Eye for an Eye[22] which directs attention to the role played by Jews in the NKVD and concentration camps, thereby casting doubt on the Jewish status as history’s most martyred; while Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry focuses directly on how Jews individually and collectively have profited from the ‘Holocaust’. Another problem for Sack, acknowledged as a ‘founder of literary journalism’,[23] is that his book exposes the role of Israel in protecting these Jewish murderers under the ‘Law of Return’ and refusing to extradite them to face trial, while, as is well known, Organised Jewry and Israel have been relentless in pursuing alleged ‘war criminals’. Sack’s exposé of Jewish culpability in post-war atrocities brought allegations against him from Deborah Lipstadt that he was a ‘worse than a Holocaust denier’, Lipstadt’s claim to academic fame being that she seems to have coined the widely used but – from a scholarly viewpoint – useless, terms ‘Holocaust denial’ and ‘Holocaust denier’,[24] the present-day equivalents to ‘Witch’ or ‘Heretic’.[25] Hence, Sack had the following exchange with Lipstadt , where it is apparent that she was referring to what she calls ‘relativising the Holocaust’:

On the Charlie Rose Show I was called an ‘anti-Semite’ and a ‘neo-Nazi’ by Deborah Lipstadt. I called her up after that and reminded her that I’d read her book, and I sent her a nice note about it and told her what I was trying to do in my book, and I said ‘How could you have said that about me?’ She said ‘You are worse than a “Holocaust denier,”’ and I said ‘Deborah, I’m worse than a ‘Holocaust denier?’ and she said ‘You are worse than a “Holocaust denier”’. I said ‘Could you explain why?,’ and she said ‘No. I have a faculty meeting,’ and that’s the last I talked to her. It doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t hurt me. It amuses me.[26]

It is heartening that John Sack was by then in a situation where he could afford to be ‘amused’. Others have sustained considerable injury in challenging some aspect of history that has affronted the Holocaust Lobby and/or Zionism.

‘Relativising the Holocaust’

It remains to be seen whether the Holocaust Lobbyists will harass Prof. Douglas for ‘relativism’ in regard to Orderly and Humane. It is more likely that such a reaction would be seen as counter-productive and the book best ignored. However, the fact remains that Orderly and Humane, albeit of necessity at the moment judged only by the Yale University Press description, is an example of ‘Holocaust relativism’. As mentioned, Lipstadt gives much attention to this ‘relativism’ in Denying the Holocaust, and opines that it is the logical strategic direction for ‘Holocaust deniers’, with Chapter 11 being devoted to the subject. Lipstadt castigates socialist historian Dr Harry Elmer Barnes, for example, for ‘relativising the Holocaust’, and the issue of German atrocities in general, by claiming that they were no worse than Allied atrocities; indeed, less so.[27] Concerned that this ‘relativism’ undermines Germany’s guilt complex and its ‘moral obligation to welcome all those who seek refuge’, she condemns German historian Ernst Nolte as coming ‘dangerously close to validating the deniers’ in his work The European Civil War 1917-1945, because he states that ‘more “Aryans” than Jews were killed at Auschwitz’.[28] Lipstadt explains:

These historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of their work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor. Ultimately the relativists contribute to the fostering of what I call the ‘yes, but’ syndrome. … Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was essentially no different than an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred.

Relativism, however convoluted, sounds far more legitimate than outright denial… In the future, deniers may adopt and adapt a form of relativism as they attempt to move from well outside the parameters of rational discourse to the fringes of historical legitimacy.[29]

Hence, Lipstadt finds it essential to deny even the existence of certain well-documented Allied atrocities, and to repudiate any suggestion that America’s role in Vietnam or the activities of Pol Pot are the moral equivalents to the killing of Jews. All other atrocities are relatively insignificant because it was only Jews who were killed as Jews. One might then ask whether the real bone of contention is that more value is put on the life of a Jew than a Gentile, a question that often occurs in regard to Israel’s actions against Palestinians, and one that was broached by another Jewish heretic, Dr Israel Shahak.[30] Therefore Lipstadt considers it unacceptable that historians such as Nolte have ‘relativised’ the ‘Holocaust’ by comparing it to ‘a variety of twentieth–century outages, including the Armenian massacres that began in 1915, Stalin’s gulags, US policies in Vietnam, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Pol Pot atrocities in the former Kampuchea. According to them the Holocaust was simply one among many evils’. [31] Lipstadt objects that these relativists are ‘obscuring crucial contrasts between Stalinism and Nazism’, because the terror allegedly perpetrated by Stalin, and others, was ‘arbitrary, whereas that of the Nazis ‘targeted a particular group’.[32]

Lipstadt’s denial in regard to group persecution other than that involving Jews is of course nonsense: Stalin targeted the kulaks as a class, and many other groups for centuries have been targeted for class, religious and ethnic reasons, such as the 40,000 Cossacks who were repatriated from Austria back to the USSR and to death with the connivance of the Allies after the war. Since the deportees included women and children, and therefore non-combatants, the Cossacks were presumably being deported as an ethnic group. [33] Hence, in making the ‘Holocaust’ a unique experience in history, Lipstadt’s methodology seems to include simply denying the existence of any non-Jewish genocidal experience—itself a denial of surpassing scope and depth. For example, the genocidal character of the Morgenthau Plan for the starvation of the German population, she claims, ‘was never put into effect’.[34] ‘Furthermore’, she states, ‘there was no starvation program in Germany, and the rations Germans received far surpassed anything concentration camp inmates were ever given by the Nazis’.[35] James Bacque, who would certainly be regarded as a ‘Holocaust relativist, documents a different view.[36]

Which returns us to the problem of Prof. Douglas’s forthcoming book on the mass deportation of ethnic Germans in the aftermath of World War II. There are, as described by Yale University Press, salient features of Douglas’s book that make it a seminal work on ‘Holocaust relativity’:

The numbers involved are higher than those of dislocated Jews in Europe during World War II: 12,000,000 to 14,000,000.

Most were women and children, deported after the conclusion of hostilities, and cannot therefore be regarded as ‘enemy aliens’, such as the Jews in Reich Territory during World War II or German, Italian and Japanese civilians in Allied states during that war.

At least 500,000 died en route.

The deportation of the ethnic Germans is described as: ‘the largest recorded episode of what we now call “ethnic cleansing”’.

The book is said to describe perhaps ‘the most significant untold story of the Second World War’.

These factors tick all the boxes in regard to the scholarly heresy termed ‘Holocaust relativism’. Will Prof. Douglas be subjected to the same persecution that has been meted out to others, for being, like John Sack, ‘worse than a holocaust denier’? Prof. Douglas remains oblivious to the possibility. I put to him the following:

…I assume then, you would not regard your forthcoming book on the expulsion of ethnic Germans from central Europe as ‘relativising the Holocaust’, which is the contention of Dr Lipstadt on such subjects? I note that the Yale University Press description of your book states that the expulsions were the worst examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which would certainly qualify for Dr Lipstadt’s term.[37]

Prof. Douglas, already probably put on guard from my prior questions as to whether his repudiation of the allegations against Churchill also apply in principle to allegations relative to the ‘Holocaust’,[38] commented simply: ‘Indeed I would not, for reasons that are set forth in the book itself’.[39] Yet, whatever the rationalisations Prof. Douglas has used to try and dodge the question of ‘relativising the Holocaust’, any suggestion that there was a large-scale ‘ethnic cleansing’ of any people other than Jews, let alone being described by Yale University Press as the ‘largest recorded’ in history, is going to mark Prof. Douglas down as a ‘Holocaust relativist’ and like John Sack, ‘worse than a Holocaust denier’. A frank opinion was not forthcoming from Prof. Lipstadt when I asked her opinion of the forthcoming Douglas book:

Dear Dr Lipstadt
Could I direct your attention to an advertising blurb from Yale Uni. Press for a forthcoming book by Dr R M Douglas: Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War ?

Yale Uni. Press describes the book as dealing with , ‘the largest recorded episode of what we now call “ethnic cleansing”, and it may also be the most significant untold story of the Second World War’.

While we do not yet have the advantage of the book being published, wouldn’t the description by Yale Uni. Press suggest an example of ‘relativizing the Holocaust’?[40]

In the meantime, the thorny question of the alleged Turkish genocide against Armenians has again been raised. Raffi K. Hovannisian, first Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs, has raised the matter in an article published by Foreign Policy Journal. He writes that, ‘On February 28, the Constitutional Council of the French Republic struck down a bill, previously enacted by its legislature, that would have made it a crime to deny the Armenian Genocide’.[41] While supporters of freedom of historical enquiry will, frankly, be supportive of the decision by the Constitutional Council for having refrained from a further curtailing of freedom of opinion, the double-standards cannot go unnoticed in regard to France’s draconian laws prohibiting any questioning of Holocaust dogma. It seems clear that the Armenian attempt to get such a law passed would have been inspired by France’s criminalization of ‘Holocaust revisionism’. Certainly, what Hovannisian writes can only be described as the worst form of Lipstadtian ‘Holocaust relativisation’:

What befell the Armenian nation in 1915 was more than genocide, more than holocaust. It was not only the premeditated taking of human lives. It was the collective murder of a nation, a culture, a civilization, and a time-honored way of life…. The Armenian Genocide was the Young Turk regime’s comprehensive and violent dispossession, unprecedented in its evil and effect, of the Armenian nation.[42] [Emphases added].

As referred to above, Lipstatdt vehemently condemns those who have the chutzpah or the naiveté to suggest that any event in history is even comparable to ‘The Holocaust’. She refers specifically to the alleged Armenian genocide as one such example. She states that ‘it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people’,[43] while Hovannisian asserts, to the contrary, that it was ‘more than genocide, more than holocaust’. If Mr Hovannisian is not in hot water for such heretical views then the Anti-Defamation League, The Wiesenthal Center, and the rest of the multitudinous Judaeocentric gaggle throughout the world, are off their game.

‘Many scholars’ might have sought the explanation for Arab distrust here, since it would be professionally unwise to point out that the roots of distrust are to be found in the betrayal of T E Lawrence’s Arab rebels who fought Turkish occupation during World War I, the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world, and other promises to the Arabs on which the French and British reneged. See: K.R. Bolton, ‘Anders Breivik and the “Clash of Civilizations”’, Counter Currents, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/anders-breivik-and-the-clash-of-civilizations-part-1/

Such as the killing of French academic Francois Duprat in 1978 by the ‘Remembrance Commando’. ‘Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France’, The Journal of Historical Review, March-April 1996 (Vol. 16, No. 2), pages 2-13, http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n2p-2_Faurisson.html (Accessed: 29 February 2012).

John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge against Germans in 1945 (Arizona: Basic Books, 1993).

Sack’s description of ‘Holocaust deniers’ at a 2001 conference of the Institute for Historical Review, to which he was invited to speak, was that,

They were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual. Their eyes weren’t fires of unapproachable certitude and their lips weren’t lemon twists of astringent hate. Nazis and neo-Nazis they were certainly not. Nor were they antisemites….